The Given Day

by Dennis Lehane

  “You’re on thin fucking ice, sir.”

  His father looked at him, his mouth half-open.

  “Just so you know,” Danny said and could hear the tightness in his own voice.

  Eventually his father nodded. It was the sage nod, that one that let you know he was acknowledging one aspect of your character while pondering flaws in another. He took Danny’s glass. He carried it to the decanter with his own and refilled them.

  He handed Danny his glass. “Do you know why I allowed you to box?”

  Danny said, “Because you couldn’t have stopped me.”

  His father clinked his glass with his own. “Exactly. I’ve known since you were a boy that you could occasionally be prodded or smoothed, but you could never be molded. It’s anathema to you. Has been since you could walk. Do you know I love you, boy?”

  Danny met his father’s eyes and nodded. He did. He always had. Strip away all the many faces and many hearts his father showed the world when it suited him, and that face and that heart were always evident.

  “I love Con’, of course,” his father said. “I love all my children. But I love you differently because I love you in defeat.”

  “Defeat?”

  His father nodded. “I can’t rely on you, Aiden. I can’t shape you. This thing with O’Meara is a perfect example. This time it worked out. But it was imprudent. It could have cost you your career. And it’s a move I never would have made or allowed you to make. And that’s the difference with you, of all my children—I can’t predict your fate.”

  “But Con’s?”

  His father said, “Con’ will be district attorney someday. Without a doubt. Mayor, definitely. Governor, possibly. I’d hoped you’d be chief of police, but it’s not in you.”

  “No,” Danny agreed.

  “And the thought of you as mayor is one of the more comical ideas I’ve ever imagined.”

  Danny smiled.

  “So,” Thomas Coughlin said, “your future is something you’re hell-bent on writing with your own pen. Fine. I accept defeat.” He smiled to let Danny know he was only half serious. “But your brother’s future is something I tend to like a garden.” He hoisted himself up on the desk. His eyes were bright and liquid, a sure sign that doom was on the way. “Did Nora ever talk much about Ireland, about what led her here?”

  “To me?”

  “To you, yes.”

  He knows something.

  “No, sir.”

  “Never mentioned anything about her past life?”

  Maybe all of it.

  Danny shook his head. “Not to me.”

  “Funny,” his father said.

  “Funny?”

  His father shrugged. “Apparently you two had a less intimate relationship than I’d imagined.”

  “Thin ice, sir. Very thin.”

  His father gave that an airy smile. “Normally people talk about their pasts. Particularly with close…friends. And yet Nora never does. Have you noticed?”

  Danny tried to formulate a reply but the phone in the hall rang. Shrill and loud. His father looked at the clock on the mantel. Almost ten o’clock.

  “Calling this home after nine o’clock?” his father said. “Who just signed his own death warrant? Sweet Jesus.”

  “Dad?” Danny heard Nora pick up the phone in the hall. “Why do you—?”

  Nora knocked softly on the door and Thomas Coughlin said, “It’s open.”

  Nora pushed open the doors. “It’s Eddie McKenna, sir. He says it’s urgent.”

  Thomas scowled and pushed himself off the desk and walked out into the hall.

  Danny, his back to Nora, said, “Wait.”

  He came out of the chair and met her in the doorway as they heard his father pick up the phone in the alcove off the kitchen at the other end of the hall and say, “Eddie?”

  “What?” Nora said. “Jesus, Danny, I’m tired.”

  “He knows,” Danny said.

  “What? Who?”

  “My father. He knows.”

  “What? What does he know? Danny?”

  “About you and Quentin Finn, I think. Maybe not all of it, but something. Eddie asked me last month if I knew any Finns. I just chalked it up to coincidence. It’s a common enough name. But the old man, he just—”

  He never saw the slap coming. He was in too close and when it connected with his jaw, he actually felt his feet move beneath him. All five foot five of her, and she nearly knocked him to the floor.

  “You told him.” She practically spit the words into his face.

  She started to turn and he grabbed her wrist. “Are you fucking crazy?” It came out a harsh whisper. “Do you think I would ever—ever, Nora—sell you down the river? Ever? Don’t look away. Look at me. Ever?”

  She stared back into his eyes and hers were those of a hunted animal, darting around the room, searching for safety. One more night alive.

  “Danny,” she whispered. “Danny.”

  “I can’t have you believe that,” he said, and his voice cracked. “Nora, I can’t.”

  “I don’t,” she said. She pressed her face to his chest for a moment. “I don’t, I don’t.” She pulled back and looked up at him. “What do I do, Danny? What?”

  “I don’t know.” He heard his father replace the receiver in the cradle.

  “He knows?”

  “He knows something,” Danny said.

  His father’s footfalls came down the hall toward them and Nora broke away from him. She gave him one last wild, lost look and then turned into the hall.

  “Sir.”

  “Nora,” her father said.

  “Will you need anything, sir? Tea?”

  “No, dear.” His father’s voice sounded shaky as he turned into the room. His face was ashen and his lips trembled. “Good night, dear.”

  “Good night, sir.”

  Thomas Coughlin closed the pocket doors behind him. He walked to the desk in three long strides and drained his drink and immediately poured himself another. He mumbled something to himself.

  “What?” Danny said.

  His father turned, as if surprised to find him there. “Cerebral hemorrhage. Went off in his head like a bomb.”

  “Sir?”

  He held out his glass, his eyes wide. “Struck him to the floor of his parlor and he was off to see the angels before his wife could even get to the phone. Jesus H.”

  “Sir, you’re not making sense. Who are you—?”

  “He’s dead. Commissioner Stephen O’Meara is dead, Aiden.”

  Danny put his hand on the back of a chair.

  His father stared out at the walls of his study as if they held answers. “God help this department now.”

  CHAPTER twenty-one

  Stephen O’Meara was laid to rest at Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline on a white, windless morning. When Danny searched the sky he found neither birds nor sun. Frozen snow covered the ground and the treetops in a marble white cast that matched the sky and the breath of the mourners gathered around the grave. In the sharp air, the echo of Honor Guard’s twenty-one-gun salute sounded less like an echo and more like a second volley of gunfire from another, lesser burial on the other side of the frozen trees.

  O’Meara’s widow, Isabella, sat with her three daughters and Mayor Peters. The daughters were all in their thirties and their husbands sat to their left followed by O’Meara’s grandchildren, who shivered and fidgeted. At the end of that long line sat the new commissioner, Edwin Upton Curtis. He was a short man with a face the color and texture of a long-discarded orange peel and eyes as dull as his brown shirt. Back when Danny was just out of diapers, Curtis had been mayor, the youngest in the history of the city. He was neither now—young nor mayor—but in 1896 he’d been a fair-haired Republican naïf who’d been fed to the rabid Democratic ward bosses while the Brahmins searched for a longer-term solution of more substantial timber. He’d left the highest office in City Hall one year after he entered it and the appointments that followed for hi
m had so diminished in stature that two decades later, he’d been working as a customs clerk when outgoing Governor McCall appointed him to replace O’Meara.

  “I can’t believe he had the guff to show up,” Steve Coyle said later at Fay Hall. “Man hates the Irish. Hates police. Hates Catholics. How’re we going to get a fair shake from him?”

  Steve still called himself “police.” He still attended meetings. He had nowhere else to go. Still, his was the question at Fay Hall that morning. A megaphone had been placed on a stand in front of the stage for the men to give testimonials to their late commissioner, while the rest of the rank and file milled among the coffee urns and beer kegs. The captains and lieutenants and inspectors were holding their own memorial across town with fine china and French cuisine at Locke-Ober, but the foot soldiers were here in Roxbury, trying to voice their sense of loss for a man they’d barely known. So the testimonials had begun to fade as each man told a story about a chance meeting with the Great Man, a leader who was “tough but fair.” Milty McElone was up there now, recounting O’Meara’s obsession with uniforms, his ability to spot a tarnished button from ten yards out in a crowded squad room.

  On the floor, the men sought out Danny and Mark Denton. The price of coal had jumped another penny in the last month. Men returned from work to icy bedrooms puffed with vapor clouds from their children’s mouths. Christmas was just around the corner. Their wives were sick of darning, sick of serving thinner and thinner soup, angry that they couldn’t shop the Christmas sales at Raymond’s, at Gilchrist’s, at Houghton & Dutton. Other wives could—the wives of trolley drivers, of teamsters, of stevedores and dockworkers—but not the wives of policemen?

  “I’m fed up being put out of my own bed,” one patrolman said. “I only sleep there twice a week as it is.”

  “They’re our wives,” someone else said, “and they’re only poor because they married us.”

  The men who took the megaphone began to express similar sentiments. The testimonials to O’Meara faded away. They could hear the wind pick up outside, see the frost on the windows.

  Dom Furst was up at the megaphone now, rolling up the sleeve of his dress blues so they could all see his arm. “These are the bug bites I got at the station just last night, boys. They jump to our beds when they’re tired of riding the backs of the rats. And they answer our gripes with Curtis? He’s one of them!” He pointed off in the general direction of Beacon Hill, his bare arm peppered with red bites. “There’s a lot of men they could have picked to replace Stephen O’Meara and send the message ‘We don’t care.’ But picking Edwin Up-Your-Arse Curtis? That’s saying, ‘Fuck you!’”

  Some men banged chairs off the walls. Some threw their coffee cups at the windows.

  “We better do something here,” Danny said to Mark Denton.

  “Be my guest,” Denton said.

  “Fuck you?” Furst shouted. “I say, ‘Fuck them.’ You hear me? Fuck them!”

  Danny was still working his way through the crowd toward the megaphone when the whole room picked up the chant:

  Fuck them! Fuck them! Fuck them! Fuck them!

  He gave Dom a smile and a nod and stepped behind him to the megaphone.

  “Gentlemen,” Danny tried but was drowned out by the continuous chant.

  “Gentlemen!” he tried again. He saw Mark Denton in the crowd giving him a cocked eyebrow and a cocked smile.

  One more time. “Gentlemen!”

  A few looked his way. The rest chanted and slashed their fists through the air and spilled beer and coffee on one another.

  “Shut. The fuck. Up!” Danny screamed it into the megaphone. Danny took a breath and looked out at the room. “We are your union reps. Yes? Me, Mark Denton, Kevin McRae, Doolie Ford. Let us negotiate with Curtis before you go off half-crazed.”

  “When?” someone shouted from the crowd.

  Danny looked out at Mark Denton.

  “Christmas Day,” Denton said. “We’ve a meeting at the mayor’s office.”

  Danny said, “He can’t be taking us lightly, he wants to meet on Christmas morn, can he, boys?”

  “Could be he’s half-kike,” someone shouted, and the men broke up laughing.

  “Could be,” Danny said. “But it’s a solid step in the right direction, boys. An act of good faith. Let’s give the man the benefit of the doubt until then, yeah?”

  Danny looked out at the several hundred faces; they were only half-sold on the idea. A few shouted “Fuck them!” again from the back of the hall and Danny pointed at the photograph of O’Meara that hung on the wall to his left. As dozens of eyes followed his fingers, he realized something terrifying and exhilarating at the same time:

  They wanted him to lead them.

  Somewhere. Anywhere.

  “That man!” he shouted. “That great man was laid to rest today!”

  The room quieted, no more shouts. They all looked to Danny, wondering where he was going with this, where he was taking them. He wondered himself.

  He lowered his voice. “He died with a dream still unfulfilled.”

  Several men lowered their heads.

  Jesus, where was he coming up with this stuff?

  “That dream was our dream.” Danny craned his head, looked out at the crowd. “Where’s Sean Moore? Sean, I saw you earlier. Raise a hand.”

  Sean Moore raised one sheepish hand in the air.

  Danny locked eyes with him. “You were there that night, Sean. In the bar, the night before he died. You were with me. You met the man. And what did he say?”

  Sean looked at the men around him and shifted on his feet. He gave Danny a weak smile and shook his head.

  “He said…” Danny’s eyes swept the room. “He said, ‘A promise is a promise.’”

  Half the room clapped. A few whistled.

  “A promise is a promise,” Danny repeated.

  More clapping, a few shouts.

  “He asked whether we had faith in him. Do we? Because it was his dream as much as it was ours.”

  Bullshit, Danny knew, but it was working. Chins lifted all over the room. Pride replaced anger.

  “He raised his glass—” And here Danny raised his own glass. He could feel his father working through him: the blarney, the appeal to sentiment, the sense of the dramatic. “And he said, ‘To the men of the Boston Police Department, you have no peers in this nation.’ Will you drink to that, boys?”

  They drank. They cheered.

  Danny dropped his voice several octaves. “If Stephen O’Meara knew we were without peer, Edwin Upton Curtis will know it soon enough.”

  They started chanting again, and it took Danny several moments to recognize the word they chanted because they’d broken it into two syllables so it sounded like two words, and he felt blood rush up his face so quickly it felt cold and newly born:

  “Cough-lin! Cough-lin! Cough-lin!”

  He found Mark Denton’s face in the crowd and saw a grim smile there, a confirmation of something, of previously held suspicions maybe, of fate.

  “Cough-lin! Cough-lin! Cough-lin!”

  “To Stephen O’Meara!” Danny shouted, raising his glass again to a ghost, to an idea. “And to his dream!”

  When he stepped away from the megaphone, the men besieged him. Several even tried to lift him above the fray. It took him ten minutes to reach Mark Denton, who placed a fresh beer in his hand and leaned in to shout into his ear above the crowd noise. “You set a hell of a table.”

  “Thanks,” Danny shouted back.

  “You’re welcome.” Mark’s smile was taut. He leaned in again. “What happens if we don’t deliver, Dan? You thought of that? What happens?”

  Danny looked out at the men, their faces sheened with sweat, several reaching past Mark to slap at Danny’s shoulder, to raise their glasses to him. Exhilarating? Hell, it made him feel like kings must feel. Kings and generals and lions.

  “We’ll deliver,” he shouted back at Mark.

  “I sure as hell hope so.”
>
  Danny had a drink with Eddie McKenna at the Parker House a few days later, the two of them lucky to find chairs by the hearth on a bitter evening of black gusts and shuddering window frames. “Any news on the new commissioner?”

  McKenna fingered his coaster. “Ah, he’s a lackey for the fucking Brahmins, through and through. A purple-veined whore wearing virgin’s clothes, he is. You know he went after Cardinal O’Connell himself last year?”

  “What?”

  McKenna nodded. “Sponsored a bill at the last Republican Convention to pull all public funding from parochial schools.” He raised his eyebrows. “They can’t take our heritage, they go after our religion. Nothing’s sacred to these Haves. Nothing.”

  “So the likelihood of a raise…”

  “The raise is not something I’d concern myself with for a bit.”

  Danny thought of all the men in Fay Hall the other morning chanting his name and he resisted the urge to punch something. They’d been so close. So close.

  Danny said, “I got a meeting with Curtis and the mayor in three days.”

  McKenna shook his head. “There’s only one thing to do during regime change—keep your head down.”

  “What if I can’t?”

  “Ready it for a new hole.”

  Danny and Mark Denton met to discuss strategy for their morning meeting with Mayor Peters and Commissioner Curtis. They sat at one of the tables in the back of the Blackstone Saloon on Congress Street. It was a dive, a well-known cops’ bar where the other men, sensing that Mark and Danny held keys to their fate, left them alone.

  “A raise of two hundred a year is no longer enough,” Mark said.

  “I know,” Danny said. Cost of living had risen so dramatically in the last six months that all that prewar figure would do was restore the men to the poverty level. “What if we come in asking for three hundred?”

  Mark rubbed his forehead. “It’s tricky. They could get to the press before us and say we’re greedy. And Montreal definitely hasn’t helped our bargaining position.”